With all due respect and a thousand apologies in advance for my ignorance, but that link is to an email that references a web page that says that a JBoss AS 6.1 may or may not come at an unknown time in the future?

So I really don't get why JBoss has end-of-lifed its brand new Java EE 6 implementation, after only 3 months and with no replacement available. Or was this done because there are too many bugs in JBoss AS 6 and JBoss does not recommend it for production use?

Sorry for so many question, but I'm really confused about this. Hope you can shed some light on it.

You'd think that because The Community (whatever that means) spent a lot of time filing bugs, providing patches, and trying to get them addressed, that the JBoss people would at least not suddenly close the lot of them.

Still, I admit there's tons of bugs that haven't been touched in years and for whatever reason never marked out-of-date.

I don't expect AS7 to be "less buggy" than AS6, but maybe more attention will be made since it's going to turn into the next EAP product. I'd like to help out with AS7 but it's really not complete, even if it is supposedly being released end of May.

"End-of-life" was perhaps a poor choice of words on my part. It's open source so there really is no such thing as an EOL project, as the code is readily available. What I meant was that the AS development team (and active contributors) are focusing their efforts on 7, and will not be actively pursuing issues on 6. If some members of the community are interested in further developing 6, and are willing to produce enough good quality, well tested patches to be worth a release (including taking a look at the issues assigned to 6.1.0), we would be willing to take 6.1.0 off hold.

For those wondering about why all unscheduled issues where closed, see my write-up on the as7 dev list:

It was decided to separate delivering EE6 and a major architectural evolution in two separate releases so that developers wanting to build ee6 applications would have less of a wait. Note that AS5 took a long time, and developers where complaining that it was taking to long to get their hands on EE5. So this time around we decided to base EE6 on AS5 technology. We could have called it 5.x but we felt that a very different set of spec APIs should cause a new major version. It also left the door open to do more 6 releases should 7 take longer than expected. So far things are executing to plan so we don't see a huge pressing need for another 6 interim release.

Keep in mind that the community release series is about delivering innovation and cutting edge features as fast as possible. We don't have a long term conservative bugfix only stream, professional support, or strict compatibility requirements. That is what EAP is focused on providing.

That said, AS is still open for the community to take it where they like. If someone wants to step up and continue 6, we would certainly provide assitance.

Lastly, it's a bit much to say 6 is better off not existing. It's free code that is the result of significant man hours of work.